Dave Hone

hit just off the coast of the yucatan peninsula in mexico about 66 million years ago that basically atomized the asteroid but also importantly the bit of the ground it hit or below the seabed that it hit was basically the worst kind of rock and so it put up this enormous ash cloud and basically you have a nearly instantaneous nuclear winter i mean immediate devastation

You know, anything immediately next to it is obviously just like vaporized.

But, you know, this is the sort of thing that it's like hot enough to set fire to the atmosphere.

I think the one I read was it's something like a piece of rock about the size of Mount Everest traveling at something like 10 times the speed of sound.

So just the momentum between that speed and mass thing is just...

you know, beyond extraordinary.

Yeah.

And so, so every, there are five recognized mass extinctions in the history of life on earth and all of them are ultimately some form of climate change.

Um, whether it's volcanic eruptions or hyper oxygenation or an ice age or whatever, it's, it's, it's climate changing too quickly for things to adapt to.

and that starts, you know, that just cripples entire populations and entire species, and then if you do enough damage to enough things, you start getting ecosystem collapse.

You know, this moth has died out.

Well, it turns out that moth is the primary pollinator of this tree.

Well, that tree produced nuts, and that was the entire winter survival store for this squirrel.

Well, that squirrel was the main...

food of this cat and now suddenly the moth going has killed four other things and and everything that's attached to that um so that that's really what did for them and sadly the big things well everything dies but the big things have a lot of trouble recovering yeah so i mean this this is

You know, a classic example is, oh, well, you know, what is paleontology good for?

Well, one actually really is extinction, which is very relevant right now in that we have a very good handle on when you have extreme climate stress, what tends to suffer more and what tends to suffer less.

And as we say, big things fundamentally do.

They require more resources.

They require more area of land.